Spanish authorities are investigating dozens of former executives and board members of former Spanish savings bank Caja Madrid over the alleged use of company credit cards for personal expenses such as clothing, food and vacations, two sources familiar with the matter said.
Caja Madrid was folded into banking conglomerate Bankia SA in 2010, which two years later accepted the biggest state bailout of a Spanish bank, a symbol of the country’s financial crisis.
It is still controlled by the government through state bank restructuring fund FROB.
Caja Madrid former chairman Miguel Blesa and former Bankia president Rodrigo Rato are among 86 directors being probed, sources said.
About 15.5 million euros (US$19.6 million) of company funds is believed to have been spent inappropriately, the sources said, citing a Bankia report to Spanish authorities.
Spanish High Court Judge Fernando Andreu included the issue in an ongoing probe into how Bankia was managed in the run-up to its 2011 flotation on the stock market, a year before it nearly collapsed.
Bankia also asked those who had allegedly spent company money on personal expenses to pay it back, and recovered 197,000 euros in less than a week.
The Madrid regional government on Thursday dismissed managing director of the economy Pablo Abejas Suarez, a former Caja Madrid executive who is among those accused of credit card misuse, a government source said.
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Sales in the retail, and food and beverage sectors last month continued to rise, increasing 0.7 percent and 13.6 percent respectively from a year earlier, setting record highs for the month of March, the Ministry of Economic Affairs said yesterday. Sales in the wholesale sector also grew last month by 4.6 annually, mainly due to the business opportunities for emerging applications related to artificial intelligence (AI) and high-performance computing technologies, the ministry said in a report. The ministry forecast that retail, and food and beverage sales this month would retain their growth momentum as the former would benefit from Tomb Sweeping Day